Why AI is important to us ?

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Incredible journey to AI

4 min readJan 8, 2018

Hello, hello,

Pursuing my quest in AI, I thought a post about why AI is important to us, would be interesting.

AI is growing a fast pace and it is inevitable that it will be soon become fully integrated in our lives. Scientists say that in 2035 computer will be as intelligent as a human.

Ray Kurzweil has projected that in 2045 computers will be more intelligent than all human combined together.

This sounds pretty cool but how AI is going to make an impact in our society? Is AI going to replace our jobs? Is AI going to take over the world?

Let’s go back to the old day to understand how technology has evolved over the last century.

Automation has replaced workers in factories to carry repetitive tasks, computers have accelerated our calculations, improved our ability to communicate via social network and so on… Computers have replaced most of what we have been doing to allow us enhancing our brains.

But this has nothing to do with AI.

In fact today’s computers are simple and disciplined. The output they generate is the result of line of codes that dictate a predefined set of conditions and actions.

Example, you could write lines of codes to recognize an image of a specific species of flower. Without an AI or the use of ML, you would have to write millions of lines to detect the all the patterns of this specific flower, such as the petal length, the shape, the color, the curvature, etc. Definitely there is no way to achieve that unless you dedicate your next coming years on it. In fact, the picture might not be of a good quality, or has color you haven’t anticipated. This makes it impossible to write on lines of code.

AI is different… yes lines of codes are still needed and I assume they will always be, but in this context, the output is now no longer predictable and self-learning comes along.

To compare with the example I gave using the flower, with an AI or using ML is becomes much more easy to do. In fact all you would need to do concatenated in 4 steps to : Collect the data , pick the model, train the model and test the model. Done.

Check out my post on how I created my first ML program to perform an Iris Flower recognition.

Now think of all the possibilities that AI/ML open to our world and see how it has already started to help.

Quick example with “Spotify”. Whenever you browse Spotify to find a specific song, the more music you search for, the more the accurately the “Spotify AI” will collect information about your taste and become better at selecting the right songs for you. It will even automatically refine the list as you change your type of music.

Browsing the internet yourself and create your personal list as rapidly as an AI would be just impossible.

Other examples:

On Facebook,DeepFace is use to recognize faces and suggest tagging based on what it has learned from your profile. It’s even used to authenticate you if you lost your Facebook password.
On Youtube, AI is used to provide more useful recommendations
Waymo has built a self-driving car to improve mobility to everyone
Online Customer Services use AI to better answer customers
IBM has developed Watson an IBM supercomputer that combines artificial intelligence (AI) and sophisticated analytical software for optimal performance as a “question answering” machine.

Watson has already been contributing to a fashion show , helping designers to create a dress that changes colour in response to social sentiment.

(These are very basic example but the list goes on… )

The AI we are being exposed to today is basically millions of algorithms running in background on servers. We talk about virtual AI. People tend to see AI as a robot with human characteristics… Well maybe one day they’ll become part of us, but today this is not a priority. Today AI is bringing value to enhancing our daily task in a transparent way.

Back to the virtual AI, this is about running test in simulated environment. Test in the medical, financial, meteorological environment… Those would be so much quicker, more reliable, time saver and cheaper.

What about an AI capable of simulating a human body and perform series of test to cure a tumor? How about an AI that assist you on your daily job, perform all sorts of calculation for you, and can recommend what is the best option based on previous experiences it has tested itself?

The Human brain has about 100 billion neurons to transmit information. If we compare this number to an AI (or the AI future capabilities), we would be 10, 100, times lower.

Plus, with the level of information in our world constantly growing, experts say that every 13 months, the human knowledge is doubling and we are getting to a point where comprehending all of those information is impossible for a single human brain.

So imagine, for a doctor, getting an AI to update itself on all the new pathology present on a specific country, what are the diagnostic report, what are the potential solutions for remedies with accuracy. Imagine how more relevant the use of data this becomes.

Imagine an AI that lives in your home, this could be your personal assistant and help you in your daily activities. Or what about an AI at work that could resolve half of your job as you just give it inputs of data you don’t have the time to deal with ? Possibilities becomes exponential and we are not even at the very beginning to see what is possible.

So in a nutshell, I am still convinced that AI is incredibly amazing and will change our world, for the best.

Christelle

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